Chaotic Midday Traffic Reorganized by Color [TIMELAPSE]

Do you feel like traffic is a bit chaotic these days? Whether you’re on your way to work or traveling home for the holidays, getting stuck in gridlock traffic is no fun. In order to beat the doldrums you might find yourself staring at the cars passing you by, which can become a whirlwind of colors. To bring order to this chaos, Cy Kuckenbaker uses After Effects to create timelapses that reorganize cars on the road by color. In the video you can see the almost flawless rhythm the San Diego freeway appears to have.

The source footage for this video is a four-minute shot from the Washington Street bridge above State Route 163 in San Diego captured at 2:39pm Oct 1, 2013. My aim is to reveal the color palette and color preferences of contemporary San Diego drivers in addition to traffic patterns and volumes. There are no CG elements, these are all real cars that have been removed from one sample and reorganized.”

The San Diego study is a third edition to this video documentary series by Kuckenbaker, where he looks to “collapse time to reveal otherwise unobservable rhythms and movement in the city.” The first two parts of the study examined the skies above San Diego airport, monitoring the patterns of arriving and departing planes.